So let's turn to the Word of God. Paul,
a bondservant of God, and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according
to the faith of God's elect, and the acknowledgement of the
truth which accords with godliness. in the hope of eternal life which
God, who cannot lie, promised before time began. but has in
due time manifested his word through preaching, which was
committed to me according to the commandment of God our Saviour. Let's pray. Heavenly Father,
we do pray that you would send your Spirit amongst us, that
you would be the one who speaks to us, that we would seek wisdom
from above that we would be guided by the truth of your word, Heavenly
Father, and that we would find ourselves at rest in the wonderful,
perfect, finished work of our God and our Saviour, the Lord
Jesus Christ. Bless us this evening, Heavenly
Father, and bless those who aren't amongst us for all sorts of reasons,
because of sickness and other things. We pray for your work
in their lives, Heavenly Father, We thank you again for the sovereignty
of your salvation and the sovereignty of your work of grace in the
hearts of your people. And we thank you for the glory
of your dear son. We pray in his precious name.
Amen. So we looked at last week at
the fact that election is a fundamental Christian doctrine, but it's
more than just a fundamental Christian doctrine. According
to 1 Thessalonians 1.4, election is a fundamental Christian experience. Chapter 1 verse 4 says, Knowing,
beloved brethren, your election of God. And tonight I'd like
to talk to us for a while about what it is for us to proclaim
and for us to have what God describes here as the faith of God's elect. there is a faith, there is a
genuine, true and saving faith. And here it is described before
us, isn't it? It's the faith of God's elect. It's the faith that God brings
into the lives of God's elect. It's the faith that causes God's
people, as we saw last week, to know a God who is a God of
election, a God who is absolutely sovereign. It's a faith that
looks to a special act of the Lord God Almighty. It looks to
His purposes, it looks to His will, it looks to His decrees,
and it looks to the pleasure of His infinite, eternal mind. and as that's been revealed to
God's people in the threefold character of God. God the Father
has sworn to it and purposed it. God the Son has performed
it. And God the Holy Spirit confirms
it and makes it real in our hearts. It's not just a doctrine to be
discussed. It's an experience to be delighted
in. And this faith, this saving faith,
The faith that we want to proclaim, the faith that we want others
to enjoy with us, is the special gift of God. It's the special
gift of God to His elect children. We know those famous verses in
Ephesians 2. For by grace you have been saved
through faith. And that not of yourselves, it
is the gift of God. It is God's gift to His people.
If you turn over there to Titus chapter 3, there's just a wonderful
description. There's a wonderful description
of conversion. Conversion experienced. Verse 3. It says, For we ourselves
were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived,
serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful
and hating one another. Is that a description? of some
of the characteristics of your life? We would like to hide from
what God says about malice and envy and hateful activities. But when we see ourselves as
we really are in Adam and as we have really experienced in
our lives, at the end of the day God will call upon us to
say Amen to what God says about us. But, one of the great buts
in the scriptures, but when, see who acts here, who does all
of this, but when the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward
man appeared. not by works of righteousness
which we have done, but according to His mercy. He saved us through
the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit,
whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour,
that having been justified, justified in eternity, justified by the
Lord Jesus on the cross, justified by His grace, we should become
heirs according to the hope of eternal life. What's man done
in that equation? Where is there room for man's
will, man's work, man's worth? One of the great tragedies of
the fall, isn't it, is that we lost that wonderful opportunity,
that wonderful right, that wonderful gift of seeing God as He really
is and being with Him and being the vehicles or the vessels through
which God was able to display His glory in this world. What
a shocking transaction we all undertook in the garden. But
isn't it wonderful, isn't it? One of the things that we lost
so much, wasn't it, is that we actually lost sight, and we continually
lose sight of the fact of the goodness of God. See, when God
pours out His Spirit, when God comes in mercy, when God washes
and God renews He pours out on us, look at it there in verse
6, He pours out on us an abundance. He's poured out on us abundantly
through Jesus Christ our Saviour. It's just a wonderful thing isn't
it, to be abundance of God's mercy and grace to us. And in
a large sense, isn't it, the scriptures are calling upon us
again and again to remember the abundance of God's love and grace,
the greatness of it, the bigness of it, the cost of it to Him.
And then we are called upon to live in this world as people
who are aware of what God has done in our lives. And when we
come to interact with others, We need to be reminded, we need
to remind ourselves by the grace of God if you will, how he has
treated us. how he has treated people like
me who were for years his sworn enemy. I took it upon myself
at university to lead those opposed to anything Christian in the
Anglican College I was in there. I just despised them. I schemed
and plotted. And they were naughty in many,
many ways. But dear, oh dear, I was naughty
as well. My response was at one. that
commends me in any way at all. And I remember just spending
hours arguing with people against the scriptures and imbibing anything
that had anything to do with spirituality as long as it denigrated
the Lord Jesus. At the end of the day, we can't
stand in our natural state. We cannot stand God being God. That's why it's only by the grace
of God that when we read those words like the faith of God's
elect or as we saw in 1 Thessalonians last week, brethren, knowing
your election of God, we actually bow amazingly and adoringly to
a God who's absolutely sovereign. Just look at the way Titus, look
at the way God the Holy Spirit, through Paul writing to Titus,
describes the Lord Jesus. Verse 3, He is God, our Saviour. And to make sure that people
don't confuse the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ is God and
fully God, in verse 4, He makes sure that you don't misunderstand
it by saying, the Lord Jesus Christ, our Saviour. Over in 2, verse 13, We look forward, we're looking
for this blessed hope and the glorious appearing of our great
God and Saviour Jesus Christ. In 3 verse 4, again he is described as God
our Saviour when the kindness and love of God our Saviour. And just so you make sure that
you know that Jesus Christ is God in verse 6. He has poured
out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour. God is in the business of exalting
His Son in this world and exalting His Son in the salvation of His
people, which is why God describes His Son in Isaiah 42.1 as, My
elect whom I have chosen. God's children are elect. It's a blessed doctrine. It's
this special gift of faith that allows us to acknowledge that
with delight rather than arguing about it. And this faith is the
fruit and it's the effect. of this original eternal cause
that I talked about earlier, that this God has purposes, this
God has wills, this God has decrees, this God has eternal causes from
before the foundation of the world, and those eternal causes
are being worked out right now, at this very moment, in every
one of our lives. God's election was motivated
by God's own free will. It was motivated by God's pleasure. And He, for His pleasure, and
for the glory of His grace, chose the Church to be in Christ, to
be holy without blame, before Him in love. So this faith, the
faith of God's elect, acknowledges and delights in the fact that
everything necessary to achieve all of these purposes, everything
necessary to require for this to be accomplished gloriously,
is done so and reaches us. by grace as God reveals His sovereign
love for the Church. And this faith of God's elect
brings and nourishes the hope of eternal life. It's a blessed
hope. We are, according to the Scriptures,
If you turn over there to Titus 3.7, we are justified by his
grace that we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal
life. We are going, brothers and sisters,
to inherit a universe. We're going to inherit a universe
that we will delight in forever, because everything in that universe
will reflect the glory of God. And when we look at our brothers
and sisters in heaven, as they are robed in that righteousness,
and they are adorned with those resurrection bodies, every little
molecule of our being will bring glory to God. It'll all be about
Him. We'll see John Newell, and we'll
delight in the Lord Jesus. We'll see our brothers and sisters,
and we will delight in the Lord Jesus. We will see God's creation
and experience it, but every fiber of our being will say,
isn't Jesus amazing? Isn't He amazing? See, we're
heirs. We're heirs of eternity. We're heirs of a new creation. This should, I hope, make us
look forward for his coming and cling to this world with a very
great looseness to the things of this world. It's like I said
earlier about moving all this furniture in our sheds and things
around. It's like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic, isn't
it? Really, it's all just going to be finished. One of the wonderful
things about the fact that the Lord Jesus may come back at any
moment is that every time we look at something, we have the
possibility of saying, God can destroy this right now, can't
he? I've worked for 30 or 40 years
fixing up a rotten old house, and now it's a nice house. But
God might burn it up tonight, mightn't he? Get rid of it. I just don't need to cling to
it. I'm an heir. I'm an heir of eternity. That's
where our hope is. It's a blessed hope. It's a real
hope. And it's based, if you just look
back there in chapter one again, There is a great description
of our God. This is the hope of eternal life,
and it's based on things that God has promised. Continually,
these promises become more and more amazing. But look at verse
2, the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, cannot
lie, So when we read God's word, we have a sure and perfect and
certain word from God who cannot lie. When we read those amazing
things in the scriptures, the descriptions of who the Lord
Jesus is, as our righteousness, as our perfection, as our covenant,
as our surety, as our mediator, as someone who loves his bride,
with an extraordinary love, who says in Psalm 16 that we are
all his delight. God cannot lie. God cannot lie. Jen loves reading
Isaiah. I think the longer we go on in
life, the more we love the Psalms and the more we love Isaiah. It's just beautiful, isn't it?
You think of what it means to actually read those words in
Isaiah, especially those last 20-odd chapters. God cannot lie,
Jen, can he? It's amazing, isn't it? And you
can't, it's just too big, isn't it? It's too amazing to comprehend. But it's not too big and too
amazing to rejoice in. We don't have to know about it
all. But we do have to know Him who it is all about. And so this
faith is a faith that only the elect of God experience. And
this faith, the faith of God's elect, is a faith that causes
them to rest, because it's God's gift to them, and it's earned
by the Lord Jesus. Philippians 1.29 says, For to
you it has been granted, to you it has been gifted, on behalf
of Christ, not only to believe, It's been a gift to believe,
to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake. See, one
comes with the other, isn't it? It's a gift to believe, it's
a grant to believe, and it's a grant to suffer for believing. Because one day we will see that
all of those things, all of those difficult things and all of those
painful things, are actually part of God's will. perfect purpose
and plan for our spiritual good in this world. As Paul says in
2 Thessalonians 2, but we are bound to give thanks to God always
for you brethren, beloved by the Lord, because God from the
beginning chose you to salvation through sanctification by the
Spirit and belief in the truth. And so this faith, the faith
of God's elect, according to verse 1, it acknowledges this
truth. It gives affirmation and assent
to this truth. And it accords with godliness. See, this faith of God's elect,
this faith that God brings into the lives of His children, at
the special time of his choosing. It does not lead to loose living. The accusation that was levelled
against the Lord Jesus was that he was leading people to licentiousness. Your disciples don't wash their
hands. Your disciples pick some grains of wheat on the Sabbath. Your disciples do this. It was
always about ritual purity. And Paul was accused of the same
thing. People accuse us who say that believers are not under
the law of being people who lead others into licentiousness. that we can do as you like because
God's going to save me and it doesn't matter what I do. The
scriptures nowhere ever affirm that at all. Never once do they
do that. But we know that by grace God
will work those things in the lives of his children. And it's
only by grace that those things will genuinely come out of hearts
that are transformed. The reality is that by enough
coercion and enough incentive and enough threat living, you
can get people to be moral, to be upright citizens. But unless
God has done it in their hearts, All it does is provide an external
show of righteousness. We have grown up in a generation
that in the 19th century were extraordinarily seemingly pure
outwardly. outward righteousness got to
the stage where they'd even cover up the legs on tables because
they might have been suggested to men. It was just ridiculous
wasn't it? It's like the Muslims, they cover
the women up and yet the men are more wicked and more disgusting
in the things they do with women than you can possibly imagine.
Outward shows of morality ultimately lead to what we have seen around
us. The 19th century and the early
20th century was extraordinarily moral on the outside, but mostly
it was a morality like my family have had, and possibly yours,
it was a morality that was a human morality and had nothing to do
with the gospel of the Lord Jesus. It didn't come out of transformed
hearts. There can be no true godliness
without true faith. They're just a show because they
don't have God as the author. They don't have God as the motivation
for it. They don't have God as the fountain
of it all. They don't give any glory to
God, because man gets the glory out of it. True faith looks to the Lord
Jesus. It's personal faith. It's not
historical. It's not denominational. It's
not philosophical. It's not just heads knowledge,
but it's God's gift. And we've often quoted those
wonderful verses in Ezekiel 36, which describe what God does
when he causes someone to be born again. I will put my spirit
within you, and I will cause you to walk in my statutes, and
you will keep my judgments and do them. But what's happened
before that in Ezekiel 36-25? I will sprinkle clean water on
you and you shall be clean. I will cleanse you from all your
filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new
heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of
stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. So a heart of flesh acknowledges
that these things are God's activities to bring, and God's to do, and
for God to get the glory out of them, and for God's children
to look to what God has promised to do. We're often and will be continually
accused that we don't spend enough time talking about the moral
commandments of the New Testament. We do talk about the moral components
of the New Testament and in a sense of the Old Testament, but we
want them, like the beautiful things that they are and the
beautiful gifts they are from God, we want them to stay spiritually
alive. I love swimming in warm coral
seas. I've done it very seldom, but
it's just unbelievable seeing those fish. I don't know if any
of you have seen them. They're just amazing. If any
of you haven't seen them, it's worth trying to find them, because
they are just ridiculous. You get eyestranged from looking
at them, because they are so beautiful. And you've seen all
these amazing ones, and then you turn around and there's another
more amazing one. I saw one up on the barrier,
and it was a blue thing. It was this long, and it was
just the most ridiculous blue color you just keep thinking
why has God painted these things these ridiculous colors beautiful
sort of rainbow things and yellows and just any color they're just
ridiculously beautiful why are they so beautiful most of creation
never sees them God sees them all the time they're for his
glory but you take one of those beautiful fish and take it out
of that water and put it in water that isn't of that temperature
and that saltiness and that fish within a very short time is so
putrid that you wouldn't want to be anywhere near it whatsoever.
God's laws and God's precepts in the scriptures under the New
Covenant sit within the promises of the New Covenant. And you
can't take them outside of the promises of the New Covenant
because they don't have any life. If you take them back and put
them at the foot of Mount Sinai, they will stink. They stink in
God's nostrils because they give no glory to God and they're just
fleshly activities. God's precepts live in that beautiful
sea of all of these new covenant promises. That God is going to
do these things in our lives. But to get back to what we have
been looking at in terms of our fellowship and our engagement
with others in this world there's some beautiful words I'd like
us to look at in verse 3 of chapter 1 there is a time there is a
time for everything under heaven when the time is fulfilled God sent his son at the due time
in his own seasons God will send and make manifest. He will reveal
at His time, just as at His perfect time, He revealed His Son in
this world. He revealed Him again and again
in remarkable ways from Genesis through until the time of Malachi. He was revealed over and over
again. And then He was magnificently revealed in that 33 years He
spent on this earth. And it was at His time And it's
at his time that he continues to reveal himself, to make himself
manifest. Sovereignly he makes himself
manifest. God will sovereignly come at
a time of His choosing, and it will come in a way which will
cause God's people to say, wow, I didn't expect it then, and
I didn't expect it in that way. The Spirit, the wind blows where
it wishes. You hear the sound of it, but
you cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is
everyone who is born of the Spirit. It's revealed and it will be
revealed at God's time. And each of the lives of the
people in our church has been manifest in God's way at God's
time. Not by an activity of man, but
by an activity of God. He sends His Word. He makes His
Word alive in due time. but he has a means for doing
it. This comes to the crux of, in
some sense, our witness, isn't it, is that we actually want
people and we pray that God would manifest his word amongst us,
that his spirit would come and move in our hearts continually
to show us who the Lord Jesus is and what he has done and what
he is doing. He manifests it through His Word,
but He manifests it according to God, again and again in the
Scriptures. He manifests it at His due time through preaching. We want people to hear the Gospel
proclaimed. We want the Gospel to define
God as He is in the Scriptures. We want the Gospel that we proclaim
to be the Gospel, the Gospel that glorifies God in all of
His characteristics, His character and His purposes. And we want
a Gospel that defines and declares the Lord Jesus as He's revealed
in the Scriptures. As we saw maybe last week, in
the midst of all the cold, that the scriptures point us to the
fact that if we are going to be saved, we will be saved by
a God as He is revealed in the Scriptures, and not a God who
is a figment of the imagination of people. We will be saved by
a God who is absolutely sovereign. We will be saved by a God who
sent His Son with a purpose, and that purpose has been fulfilled
perfectly. And God's children will be saved
in the way that God describes they will be saved in the Scriptures. They will be saved through the
proclamation of the Lord Jesus. There are some verses that can
confirm that. You know them well in Romans 10. How shall they call on Him whom
they have not believed? And how shall they believe in
Him whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without
a preacher? And how shall they preach unless
they are sent? As it is written, how beautiful
are the feet of those who preach the gospel of peace, who bring
glad tidings of good things. We proclaim glad tidings of good
things. And it seems weak and it seems
foolish. I remember a debate several years
ago in another institution where a man is passionate about the
fact that preaching is passé. We no longer need to do preaching.
We need lectures and tutorials and other ways. We ought not
have church with preaching in it. Such is the wisdom of men. For since, in the wisdom of God,
the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God
through the foolishness of the message preached, to save those
who believe. The Greeks request a sign, the
Jews request a sign, the Greeks seek after wisdom, and we preach
Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block, and to the
Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and
Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God, because
the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of
God is stronger than men. We have to, if God will permit
us, have opportunity again and again to proclaim the Gospel,
to proclaim it faithfully. Remarkably, if you turn in your
Bibles to Ephesians chapter 2, there's a remarkable word here. Ephesus was a long way from Jerusalem. The Gospel didn't get to Ephesus
until some considerable time after the Lord Jesus had died. Turn to verse 17 of chapter 2. Who came and preached in Ephesus? Who came and preached to all
of those people? At the end of the day, the power
of preaching is the fact that He came and preached peace to
you who were far off and to those who were near. as we say time
and time again we want people to hear what God says we want
God to come and speak we want God to come and open blind eyes
we want God to come and bring new life we want God to do as
he says at the end of Romans remarkable promise to him who was able to establish
you. We want God to establish us. We are wandering sheep. Jamie
and I looked at that last verse in Psalm 119 a while ago. We are wandering sheep. We all
like sheep have gone astray. God's people call on God to come
and find us, to come and find us and to establish us. establish
you according to my gospel. The gospel saves, the gospel
sanctifies, and the gospel establishes us according to my gospel and
the preaching of Jesus Christ according to the revelation of
the mystery kept secret since the world began. But now it's
been revealed, it's been manifest. and by the prophetic scriptures
made known to all nations, according to the commandment of the everlasting
God, for obedience of the faith, the faith of God select. which
looks to the Lord Jesus for all of our obedience, looks to the
Lord Jesus for everything that we need before God. This is the
gospel that we proclaim. If God will grant us that grace
and cause us to stay faithful, we'll see God do things that
amaze us. He's amazed us already. Saved
people are here. It's amazing, isn't it? Heirs
of eternity are here. It's amazing. Let's proclaim
it with boldness, with courage, with consistency, with faithfulness,
with expectation. Let's pray.